What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation
Wells is a breezy, conversational writer with a knack for parsing trends and statistics. His writing is at its most alive when he is bringing the reader along for heady evocations of youth ... Wells uses social media to good effect in his writing — it is a tool his characters turn to as naturally as breathing — but I wouldn’t have minded a hair more on the ways it has influenced our inner lives and worldviews.
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The result, noble as its intentions may be, is millennial cringe in its purest form ... Wells wrangles his unwieldy material to vague pronouncements ... Wells’s book is distinctly millennial in at least two respects: First, there’s the sense of it having been written not for Wells’s own peers but rather toward the nameless authority figure whose stamp of approval/legitimation every millennial...not-so-secretly craves. Second is its obsession with dating ... I started Wells’s book confident that I understood my own generation and ended it convinced that making any kind of definitive statement about anyone was an act of insane epistemic hubris, distinguished only by degree from the rankest race science ... I suppose someone could devise a unified theory of culture that links these people, along with their seventy-two million coevals ... But one would first have to ask oneself a question that Wells sadly failed to consider: Why bother?
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Sympathetic yet uneven ... Though this provides a window into the troubled psyche of a much-discussed generation, the lack of a more insightful takeaway disappoints.
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